We occur in different languages, she said;
I knew her once, before the fall
when she would club her way through bars

with voices that would come at you
straight out of centre-field
and keep on going, all the way
to God's depleted angels

But that was then and this is now,
as they like to say
in cheap old-fashioned films

and now she masks her beauty
with a history of duelling scars
picked up in Heidelburg and Mainz;
she is starving to be beautiful

while I am lost midway between
the Sudetenland and Hell,
the immaculate cathedrals,
a pair of flannel trousers
and Vienna in the later 1930s